Best card for less then 70$

[kdsns]

hey im looking to play games like Half life 2, splinter cell 3 and doom 3.
My pc is a pentium 4, 2.4 ghz, with 256 ram. RIght now im on a geforce 4 mx and it runs my games like shit. Anyway what's a good card for under 70 $? I saw a nvidia 6600 for 60 $ at compusa, is that a good card for the price? thanks.

 

[derek2006]

Get more ram 256 mb won't run much. And get a x850xt it is 115$ and it will blow away any 70$ cards. By the way do you have a dell dimension 2400?

 

[prozac26]

Buy a used 9800Pro or 9800XT from eBay. I also strongly suggest adding memory if you want to play games.

Bare minumum would be 512mb, but I would also strongly suggest at least 1gb of RAM.

 

[enforcerfx]

Buy a used 9800Pro or 9800XT from eBay. I also strongly suggest adding memory if you want to play games.

Bare minumum would be 512mb, but I would also strongly suggest at least 1gb of RAM.

Yea, the MX4000 would run a lot better if you had 1 gig of ram, rather than 256. Hunt ebay for a 9800pro/xt or something in that class, and use the rest of that cash for a 1 gig stick of ram.

 

[derek2006]

Yea, the MX4000 would run a lot better if you had 1 gig of ram

I have a mx4000 running overclocked and no amount of ram will ever make it faster.

 

[matrixone]

try to bid on ebay, i just missed an geforce 6800GT for 68 bucks! (only the card)

 

[Morton]

Yes, Radeon 9500 (Pro), Radeon 9700 (Pro) and Radeon 9800 (Pro) are decent cards. Notice that other Radeons from 9xxx series, including Radeon 9600, are noticeably worse than these because they have smaller memory bandwith.

In 2009 you can get a decent DX10 card like Gforce 8900GT or a Radeon 2k for the same price. 8O :lol:

 

[illicitsc]

the 9500, 9700, and 9800 are all 8 pipe while the 9550 and 9600s are 4 pipe

 

[angry_ducky]

Before upgrading your grahpics card, upgrade to 1GB of RAM. If you're still not satisfied with the performance, either try overclocking the CPU/GPU, or just buying a 9700/9800Pro, like others have suggested. Just make sure you get one with 256-bit memory.

 

[kaotao]

I've got a 9800pro 128MB 256-bit interface I'll sell you for $50 +shipping. Just the card though.

 

[zenmaster]

I think his point is that the bottleneck with a system with 256meg of system memory is not the video card, but the fact that Windows will rely on heavy use of swap files during most operations involving modern games.

I recently upgraded from 1gb to 2gb to help resolve that issue in some games. I could not imagine trying to run games on 256meg.

The poster could spend $1000 on a new video card and likely see less improvement than spending a few dollars on a upgrade to 1gb of memory.

 

[mekelly]

Here's an X850xt for $95 after rebate, quite a bargain if you ask me. Considerinng how well this card performs.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16814102688

And as others have said get some more Ram

 

[angry_ducky]

Here's an X850xt for $95 after rebate, quite a bargain if you ask me. Considerinng how well this card performs.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16814102688

And as others have said get some more Ram

First of all, that card is out of stock. Second of all, the OP needs an AGP card; that X850 is PCIe.

 

[rodney_ws]

Yea, the MX4000 would run a lot better if you had 1 gig of ram

I have a mx4000 running overclocked and no amount of ram will ever make it faster.

*chuckle* Right. Adding memory to a motherboard does not in any way speed up a video card... it does however make a drastic difference in overall system performance... that was the point of the reply.

 

[Anoobis]

I feel a disturbance in the force.

Are you running a Dell (or similiar) with a P4 and using regular SDRAM instead of DDR?

 

[mekelly]

nice, wasn't sold out when I posted it. Cause I bought one about 5 mins after Didn't see the AGP part though.

 

[kaotao]

The price alone screams PCIe. Too bad they're not that cheap for AGP.

 

[melarcky]

for that price the 6600 is a great deal i have one and i have just upraded from an GF 4 MX 440 myself and i know how it feels... i am very stasfied with gf 6600